Lotus L. Kang
Borne, 2025
Cast bronze with hand-applied patina
Cabbage leaf dimensions: 21 inches (long) x 6.5 inches (wide) x 2 inches (high)
Bird dimensions: 2.5 inches (long) x 2.5 inches (wide) x 2.5 inches (high)
Edition of 25 with 7 AP’s
Published by Lisa Ivorian-Jones to benefit the New Museum
$6,500
Borne 2025 is comprised of two cabbage leaves, cast in bronze and welded together, with hand applied patina. An untethered crying baby bird, cast in bronze from a porcelain figurine original, remains modular in the sculpture’s arrangement.
The twin cabbage leaves mirror one another, fanning outwards like a pair of lungs or outspread hands. Continuing the artist’s interest in the latent potential of vessels and voids, the form suggests an offering bowl without clear ritual. The delicate ventricular vegetal arteries and veins of the leaves’ surfaces captured in bronze replica, are counterbalanced by hard-edged cuts evidencing the labor and hand inscribed in the casting process witnessed at the outer edges of the leaves. In Kang’s description, “As soon as something feels tender, I want to contrast it with a kind of severity.” By including these crude sprue marks (not buffing them away), Kang brings our attention to the technical zones which allow for molten metal to disperse through the mold during the casting process. The sprues are, in effect, orifices and conduits. In Chinese medicine, cabbage’s assigned color is white, which is also the color of the Lung organ, whose spiritual purpose is to store and release grief and loss. Kang’s open mouthed and vulnerable baby birds await their sustenance, and stand as symbols of inheritance, regurgitation, transformation and renewal, and an unceasing longing for the mother body in all its forms. The work cathartically acknowledges the contingency of being and the forebears or multitudes the body contains—a cycle of life and death already in progress.
Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985, Toronto; lives and works in Brooklyn) received an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson (2015) and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2008). Selected solo exhibitions: 52 Walker, New York (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2024); Kunstverein Munich (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale on Hudson (2023); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2023); New Museum, New York (2021); and SculptureCenter, Queens (2020). Kang is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2024). Kang has participated in residencies at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans (2023),Triangle Arts Association, New York (2022); Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles, (2022); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2020); and Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2018).
Kang’s work is in the collections of Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Kadist Art Foundation; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rivoli Due Fondazione per l'Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Tanoto Art Foundation, Singapore; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Wrocław Contemporary Museum.
The artist is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Esther Schipper, and Franz Kaka.